William Everson

William Everson, in full William Oliver Everson, byname Brother Antoninus, (born Sept. 10, 1912, Sacramento, Calif., U.S.—died June 3, 1994, Santa Cruz, Calif.), American Roman Catholic poet whose works record a personal search for religious vision in a violent, corrupt world.

Raised by Christian Scientist parents, Everson became an agnostic in his teens; while attending Fresno (California) State College, he read the verse of Robinson Jeffers and resolved to become a poet. His first book, These Are the Ravens, was published in 1935. He was drafted during World War II but served at a work camp for conscientious objectors in Waldport, Oregon, where he cofounded the Untide Press and printed his own poetry. After marrying his second wife, poet Mary Fabilli, he converted to Roman Catholicism and became a Dominican lay brother in 1951. For the next seven years he lived in monastic withdrawal, and his literary output decreased considerably. Everson fully returned to writing in 1957 with the composition of his long poem River-Root (1976), which depicts sexual love as a form of religious contemplation. He became identified with the San Francisco poetry renaissance of the Beat movement of the 1950s, and after 1957 he published most of his poetry as Brother Antoninus; in 1969 he returned to secular life and married for a third time. He taught poetry and letterpress until his retirement in 1982.

Emphatic assertions, rugged landscapes, and harsh juxtapositions mark Everson’s poetry. He considered his lifetime of work to form a trilogy, which he called The Crooked Lines of God and which is composed of The Residual Years: Poems 1934–1948 (1968), his early nature poetry; The Veritable Years: Poems 1949–1966 (1978), his religious poetry; and a projected third volume that was to have been entitled The Integral Years and was intended to contain his post-1966 poetry. In the 1980s he began writing an autobiographical epic, beginning with the cantos of In Medias Res (1984). Other collections of Everson’s poetry include The Blood of the Poet (1994) and Prodigious Thrust, published posthumously in 1996.